Daily Search Forum Recap: September 29, 2009

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

New Google Support Forums Turns One & Adds Profile Answers
It has been just over a year since Google opened the new Google help forums. The official date seemed to be the Google Talkabout forum in September 25, 2008, but most Google services didn't move over until later. The Google Webmaster Help forum didn't move until December 2008 and the Google Reader forum didn't move until last week. The forum received many updates since the launch. The most significant was the redesign last August. Today,

Google September 2009 Image Search Update Turns Out Bad?
A WebmasterWorld thread reports that Google Image Search has done an update to their index. One of the members that seems to always be on top of these images updates, zeus, has said that this update is worse off from the one in February. He said: Hmm it looks like they are now ruin the good update for 3-4 month ago, now to many images again gets filtered and a lot of images are lost

Google Hot Trends Now in Google Search Results
In May 2007, Google released Google Hot Trends and I was a major fan. Google has now made this tool more visible to the public by inserting it into the Google search results, when applicable. For example, a search for Bill Winters who recently made news by leaving quitting JP Morgan, you will see Google Hot Trends show up in the search results. Here is a picture: The goal is for Google to show this

Google's Confucius Birthday Logo
Yesterday, besides for it being Yom Kippur, was also Confucius' birthday and Google had a logo up for the birthday in some Google properties. Here is the logo: According to Matt McGee, the logo was not live in Google.com or on Google France but it was live on Google UK, Germany, Spain, Austria, Russia, Serbia, Australia, New Zealand and other properties. Why not the US or France? Maybe because it was Yom Kippur and Google

Google Also Ignores Geo-Meta Tags, But Bing Lives By Them
A Google Webmaster Help thread once again confirms that Google ignores the geo-meta tags. Those tags somewhat look like this and use to serve the purpose of telling search engines where the site is based: <meta name="geo.placename" content="United States" /><meta name="geo.position" content="x;x" /><meta name="geo.region" content="usa" /><meta name="ICBM" content="x,x" /> Google ignores them, and has for a really long time. JohnMu from Google confirmed this most recently in the thread: We generally ignore geo-meta tags like

Fake Yahoo Employee, Not Fake: Side Money?
Last week, we reported that a fake Yahoo employee might be picking up unsuspecting SEM clients. Well, I was wrong, at least about the forum person being a fake employee of Yahoo, he is. The issue is, Yahoo first told me this does not appear to be a Yahoo employee. After I fed the email address and IP info to Yahoo, they confirmed this person was a Yahoo employee. Why is there any issue? Well,